


all dead hearts to you

by kindclaws



Series: bingo, chopped, and prompts [11]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Chopped: The 100 Fanfic Challenge, F/F, Hurt/Comfort but they're bad at comfort, Just gals being pals, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-19 01:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22536376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: When the countdown ticks over into the last minute, Raven forces herself to begin imagining a world without Bellamy. It’s not easy to shove aside her initial impulses to bargain with the universe, with her own rationality. Maybe her predictions are too pessimistic. Maybe they have an extra handful of minutes before the death wave reaches them and steals away their escape route. Maybe he is right outside, and he will come around the corner any second now - but she hasn’t kept her friends alive until now by being an optimist. They don’t have the luxury of hope.The rocket takes off without Bellamy. Raven and Clarke pick up the pieces.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin/Raven Reyes
Series: bingo, chopped, and prompts [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1503152
Comments: 23
Kudos: 68
Collections: Chopped: Choose Your Own Adventure





	all dead hearts to you

**Author's Note:**

> Happy femslash February! This was written - against my will - for [The 100 Chopped Choose Your Own Adventure](https://chopped100challenge.tumblr.com/) round. I took a look at the prompt list "just for fun" and was forcibly kidnapped by this idea.
> 
> Theme: Canon-divergent  
> Prompts included:  
> \- Ark AU  
> \- Character swap (Clarke and Bellamy swap places, he goes to fix the dish and is left behind to survive Praimfaya and raise Madi, Clarke goes up to the ring with the others.)  
> \- One character kisses the other, and the person who gets kissed is shocked still  
> \- One character is asleep (can be cute sleep, can be drooling mouth breathing sleep, you pick) and the other is just watching them totally in love 
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: this is not the bechdel-passing princess mechanic fluff you are looking for! Both Raven and Clarke are convinced Bellamy is dead and mourning him is a pretty big & messy part of the relationship they develop. It's a little weird and a lot angsty. D:

#

DAY 0

When the countdown ticks over into the last minute, Raven forces herself to begin imagining a world without Bellamy. It’s not easy to shove aside her initial impulses to bargain with the universe, with her own rationality. Maybe her predictions are too pessimistic. Maybe they have an extra handful of minutes before the death wave reaches them and steals away their escape route. Maybe he is right outside, and he will come around the corner any second now - but she hasn’t kept her friends alive until now by being an optimist. They don’t have the luxury of hope. 

In the time it takes her to make that impossible decision, they’re another thirty seconds closer to death.

“Can we give him an extra minute?” Emori asks, and Raven begins shaking her head even as Clarke unbuckles her seatbelt and leaps for the rocket’s open hatch. 

“Clarke!” Raven calls out sharply as she clambers out. Fucking Clarke Griffin, diving headfirst into everything. Raven leans out of the hatch and curses her. Clarke is the lone spot of colour among the lab’s shiny white surfaces, her radiation suit as bright of an orange as the fire on the horizon that has already swallowed the ruins of Mount Weather, Arkadia, the bunker - probably even Bellamy. “Clarke, come back!”

“I’m not going up without him,” Clarke snaps, her teeth bared. “He wouldn’t leave one of us behind.”

“ _We have to go!”_ Raven shouts. “If we don’t leave right now, we are _all_ dead!”

“He might be right outside, he might need help,” Clarke pleads, scrambling up the staircase. Raven swallows hard and turns to Echo, who is clinging to the straps of her seat though they haven’t moved an inch yet. 

“Echo, I need you to bring her back. Knock her out if you have to,” Raven says, and though it takes Echo a second to lift her head and focus her wide, distant gaze, Raven watches some of the terror melt away at the clear instruction. Echo nods sharply and is gone in a heartbeat, cutting like a blade through air, focused only on the destination. Raven turns back to the rocket’s controls, scanning the preflight check statuses though she knows they’re as good as they’re gonna get. It’s amazing how the fear and grief fades when you’re given a task you know you can do. She hears Clarke scream in pain and fury and bites her lip hard enough to draw blood when it abruptly cuts out.

A moment later Echo’s footsteps are thundering back up the steps to the hatch. Clarke’s body is limp and pliant in her arms. Monty and Harper buckle her in and Raven affords herself a single glance at Clarke’s head lolling on her shoulder, at the empty seat next to her. Even as the blast doors close and the thrusters fill the launch pad beneath them with flame and fuel, Raven both hopes and dreads a figure appearing at the window, banging to be let in. She dreams him all the way through the atmosphere, as the sky burns around them and their teeth rattle in their skulls. She swears she can even hear him yelling himself hoarse in their wake. 

Once they’re up on the Ark, breathing those first sweet lungfuls of oxygen, the voice in Raven’s head finally goes quiet. Clarke hasn’t woken up yet, and Raven eases her helmet off her head, brushes a lock of hair off her bruised cheek. In sleep she still looks peaceful. In sleep she doesn’t know he’s gone yet.

“Sorry Griffin,” Raven murmurs to her. “I couldn’t lose another friend today.”

  
DAY 3

The first few times Clarke wakes, she’s groggy and confused. She lets Harper tip her head back and help her drink a few mouthfuls of water at a time, but she doesn’t respond if they try to talk to her and her eyes don’t focus on their faces. Echo lingers in the doorway, her shoulders tense and slowly creeping up to ears. 

“She put up a good fight,” she mutters. None of them really know how to handle a concussion, so they let Clarke rest with the lights dimmed down and hope for the best. For the most part, the work keeps them occupied, and the deadline of starvation hangs over them all. None of it will be worth it if they run out of ration packs before the algae blooms. 

Raven already doubts it was worth it. 

Still. There are six other people on the ring with her and they are a collection of faulty hearts that keep beating frantically and Raven does not want to be the one who lets them down. Either their bodies don’t know, on a cellular level, how pointless it feels to keep going when Earth is burning so brutally out their window, or they know and they keep going anyway. 

There are enough empty rooms for them to each take one, but that first night Raven volunteers to stay with Clarke, in case she wakes up and needs something, and every night after that Raven keeps going back, afraid it’ll be worse if she’s alone. The cots aren’t very big - these rooms were meant for the environmental engineers to rest while they were on-call for geo-sci, not as proper living quarters, but Clarke barely moves and Raven curls up small and they make it fit. She wakes up in the mornings blinking away images of fire, the corners of her eyes sticky where she cried in her sleep. She drags herself out of bed and welds the ring’s broken pieces together with a chorus of everyone she’s ever let down in her ears and when she’s exhausted she crawls back into bed next to Clarke and stays up another hour or two rehearsing how to break the news to her when she finally wakes up for good. 

As luck would have it, Raven isn’t there when it happens, but she hears the screaming. The ring’s long, curved corridors muffle a lot of sound, but the screaming carries so well that at first Raven thinks it’s just a new ghost. It’s not until she hears Monty and Murphy yelling too that she realizes it’s not just the manifestation of her guilt, so she puts down her wrench and runs towards the chaos. 

When she gets there Murphy has Clarke pinned to the ground and they’ve both tired themselves out. Everyone’s crying. Everyone except Raven. They can’t afford to all break down at once. The list of repairs that needs doing is still longer than her arm. 

Clarke’s eyes are wide and all-blue when she catches sight of Raven. Her pupils are barely pinpricks in the center. 

“You left without him,” she cries out in a voice that is reed-thin, her vocal chords all screamed out. “You _killed_ \- “

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Raven snaps. “I saved the ones I could.” And for some reason the words sound familiar to him, maybe not those exact ones in that exact order, but the intention, the pain, and she remembers Clarke walking back from Finn’s execution with bloody hands and standing in place, her mouth trembling as Raven screamed at her for not saving him, and - 

Raven’s knees threaten to buckle from underneath her and it has nothing to do with her spine or the numbness in her leg. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, she suddenly understands. Oh. _Oh._

A quiet, cruel part of her whispers _now we’re even_ and makes the rest of her feel ill. Raven turns and flees as fast as her aching body will take her.

  
DAY 4

She’s awake when the knock on the door comes, but she stays perfectly quiet and still. It’s late enough that it would be perfectly plausible for Raven to be asleep, you know, if sleep didn’t come with an encore of nightmares, if her body wasn’t so primed to listen for the muffled life of Arkadia. 

But of course Clarke tries the door. Raven bites her lip as a rectangle of dim blue light widens on the wall she’s facing, Clarke’s shadow hesitating at its center. Fucking Alpha Station behaviour. 

“Raven?” Clarke’s wavering voice asks, and a moment later the cot sags under her weight as she sits by Raven’s hip. She took a different room this night, and it smells like dust. Clarke’s touch to her waist is so gentle it might be all in Raven’s imagination. “Harper said you stayed with me every night in case I woke up.”

Raven squeezes her eyes together tightly and rolls over on her back with a sharp sigh. 

“How’d you know I was awake?”

“Your breathing was fast.”

Silence. The hallway’s lights have been dimmed for the night cycle and the illumination they provide makes Clarke look like a blue-gray ghost, her cheeks sunken, the hollows of her eyes turned black holes. 

“Is that all you came for?” Raven asks. “Can I go back to sleep?” Back, as if she’s been able to get any rest. 

“I’m sorry for what I said,” Clarke says, stumbling over the words one uneven syllable at a time. “It wasn’t true.”

 _Now we’re even_ , Raven thinks again, but without the vitriol this time. 

“Okay.”

“…Do you want me to go? Or is it okay if I stay? I don’t really want to be alone.”

“No,” Raven murmurs. “I mean, I don’t want to be either.”

She shuffles closer to the wall and pays too much attention to her breathing as Clarke unlaces her boots and lies down on the other half of the cot. Being so close to her is more awkward now that she’s awake, but Raven won’t deny that the universe feels a little less huge and horrifying with the sound of someone else’s breathing. Clarke breathes slower than she does, and Raven tries to synchronize with her, but her heart is beating like a little hummingbird and trying to slow down makes her chest tight and her head dizzy. She hasn’t shared a bed with anyone since Finn. Not even Wick.

“I always thought that I’d be able to feel it if he died,” Clarke whispers to the ceiling. “I thought the world would feel… different. That I’d feel it. I still can’t believe it.”

Raven pulls her pillow closer and wonders why the hell Clarke came to her if she wants to talk. She sifts through the list of survivors on the ring, weighing them in her mind. Monty would probably be the best at this. Maybe Harper, if she weren’t fighting so many of her own demons right now. But Raven doesn’t make the top five. Unless this is just supposed to be dead lover solidarity. 

“I guess I thought so too,” Raven admits reluctantly. “But even when I saw his body I didn’t really believe it. I kept thinking he’d open his eyes and get off the pyre.” 

Even when he burned, she’d still kind of hoped he’d wake up, however fucked that is.

“I’m sorry about that, too,” Clarke says softly. 

“Yeah,” Raven says, bumping her forehead against Clarke’s shoulder. She rolls over to face the wall again. “Go to sleep now.”

But she listens to Clarke’s breathing for a long time after that and she’s pretty sure neither of them fall asleep quickly.

  
DAY 15

Murphy finds a stash of clothing two weeks in, and Raven kind of wants to kiss him for it. On the list of problems they’re trying to deal with, worrying about having one set of clothing for the next five years was pretty low, though it was getting really gross pulling on the same shirt after she showered, and it’s nice that someone else solved it. The cockroach is good for something after all. 

The first thing Raven claims for herself is a baggy sweater with ragged thumbholes. The temperature on the ring is still dangerously fluctuating. When the Ark came apart it left tears in the mylar insulation. When they're sunside, the station overheats, and when they pass into the Earth's shadow all their heat leaks into space, and Raven is still hunting down all the tears. Most of their power is being diverted to Monty’s algae farm, since it’s the most frightening single point of failure in their tentative survival, and what’s left for environmental life support isn’t enough to make up the difference. The sweater is good and warm and soft and she doesn’t cry over the minor luxury of a nice sweater. She doesn’t. 

(She does.)

  
DAY 47

“I don’t know what to do with myself without a war,” Clarke murmurs, her hands gesturing helplessly. “There’s no one for me to threaten. No one to hurt my friends, nothing to stitch up. I don’t know what to do for the next five years. I’m useless.”

Not for the first time, Raven wishes humans were more like machines. She wishes she could open Clarke up and check all her wires. Blow the dust off her circuits and oil the joints, check the error log and know exactly where the pain is. In a darker corner of Raven’s mind a voice that sounds like hers, but worse, whispers that Alie already tried that. 

_This would be different_ , Raven says. _I wouldn’t erase it._ But she still doesn’t know what to say. The problem is that she knows how important it is to feel needed, and she can’t think of anything for Clarke to do either. She forged herself into a very effective tool on a version of Earth that just doesn’t exist anymore.

“You’re smart,” Raven mumbles, feeling like she should say _something_ to fill the silence. “You’ll figure something out.”

“You’re a _literal_ rocket scientist,” Clarke says with a humourless laugh. “No one’s smart compared to you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s different,” Raven snaps, tensing up and drawing her knees to her chest like a barrier between them. She wraps her arms around her legs to keep them there. Her busted leg likes to try to escape. She didn’t come here to talk about herself and she’s irritated at Clarke for bringing up her brain and the massive responsibility on her to keep them all alive for the next five years. She thought Clarke would be the one place on the ring where she could escape herself, where someone else’s grief could drown out the sound of hers. _And_ it’s irritating that Clarke is putting herself down like this. Raven couldn’t have kept order in a campful of delinquents or brokered a peace deal - however shortlived - with a warlord or kept everyone from killing each other when news of Praimfaya began to spread. Raven can fix anything mechanical, but people are beyond her. “People are completely different,” she mutters, propping her chin on her knees. 

Clarke leans her head back against the opposite wall with a quiet _thud_. 

“Maybe I’ll learn how to sing,” Clarke says. “Serenade you guys over dinner.”

“No offense, but I think Murphy would murder you,” Raven says, and impossibly, Clarke smiles. 

It feels good to make her smile. It occurs to Raven that she hasn’t actually seen a smile since before the world ended. She hadn’t realized until now how valuable they might be.

Two days later, Monty declares the first batch of algae ready for consumption, and it puts Murphy into a coma. He looks so small and young and pale stretched out there, and Raven excuses herself to go throw some tools around in her favourite airlock and scream along with the clash of metal. It’s not fucking _fair_ , that they made it this far when so many others didn’t, that even all that isn’t a guarantee that they’ll be safe and alive. She’s had enough. She’s seen enough, _done_ enough. 

Murphy wakes up. Raven didn’t think he would. Clarke sat by his bed and monitored his vitals and made no promises about his recovery, and Raven assumed that meant it was bad. When he’s well enough to tell them all to fuck off, Raven nudges Clarke with her shoulder. 

“Guess you’re useful up here after all,” she says. But Clarke doesn’t seem to think it’s funny, and Raven retreats with a sick, guilty feeling in her stomach that she tries - and fails - to blame on the algae.

DAY 64

Algae attempt number two. Murphy sits at the far end of the table, his posture sullen and reluctant, his hands pointedly resting in his lap. For once, Raven thinks he’s got the right to be a bit of an asshole. He took one for the team with the first batch, and in his place, she’d be reluctant to taste the second as well. Clarke volunteered to be patient zero this time, and it’s been a few hours and she seems fine, if a little nauseated by the taste, so Raven picks up her bowl and forces the mixture down. Monty watches her reaction like a hawk, and Raven can only hope she’s not grimacing as much on the outside as she is on the inside. She doesn’t want to make him feel bad. He’s doing the best he can with very limited resources. 

They all are. 

They found the Chancellor’s baton a few weeks back, and though there was some talk of saving it for the day they return to Earth, as it was intended, after Murphy’s coma everyone unanimously agrees they might not be able to wait that long. So Echo cracks open the sticky seal and pours them each a shot to usher in the new erea. Raven drags her glass to the edge of the table and twists it absently between her fingers. 

“Should we say something?” she murmurs. Harper rises to the challenge, raising her glass high above her head where the flickering fluorescent ceiling light scatters through it. Raven’s been meaning to replace that, too. 

“To the friends who got us this far,” Harper says, her voice clear and fierce even as it wavers. Raven throws her shot back so quickly she barely tastes it. She’s been biting her lip while she works too much lately, and the sting of alcohol in the cuts she keeps reopening lingers long past dinner. Clarke drinks with the rest of them but her gaze is far and distant. She eats mechanically. Doesn’t even react when Murphy and Emori get into a burping war. Raven picks at the skin on her lip until it bleeds again.

DAY 112

“Come do a spacewalk with me,” Raven says, and Clarke blinks rapidly. It’s almost cute, the way her face goes from shock to confusion to restrained curiosity. 

“Is that allowed?” she asks, and Raven barks out a laugh. Raven’s chief engineer now. She always knew she would be someday, but not so soon.

“Who’s going to stop us?” she answers, spreading her arms wide to encompass the ring’s devastating silences, the lingering void of the society that once moved through it like a river coursing. 

“Whatever the hell we want,” Clarke murmurs to herself, so quiet Raven barely hears it. She’s not sure what that means, but she gets the feeling it’d be better not to ask, so she just pulls two EVA suits out of storage and shows Clarke how to climb in and read the gages, double and triple checks all of her seals. Clarke’s breathing starts getting fast as the airlock is cycling through and Raven secures the tethers. 

“Hey,” Raven promises. “You’re with me. You’re safe, because I know exactly what I’m doing.”

She sees Clarke nod within the dome of her helmet and smiles in what she hopes is a reassuring way. She never signed up for shifts with new trainees, too impatient to walk them through their first spacewalks, and she feels a flicker of apprehension when the airlock doors open to the void of space, Clarke grabs at her, clumsy with the oversized gloves of her EVA suit. Raven thinks for a moment and clips Clarke’s spare tether to her waist. 

“Come on,” she says. “Eyes on your feet, just watch where you step, don’t look up.” Clarke’s breathing is loud and ragged in her earpiece, but she follows Raven out the door and clamps the magnetic locks on her boots onto the ring’s outer hull. Raven’s blood is already singing in anticipation. “Now raise your head slowly, slowly, until where the horizon should be. Don’t look past that.” 

Raven looked straight up - or rather, straight _out_ at the stars on her first spacewalk and barely felt a hint of the usual vertigo, just an unspeakable wonder and relief. She felt like she’d looked on the face of the divine, and it was pockmarked by galaxies and the soft blurs of the solar system’s outer planets, and it had known her name. The others had puked in their helmets as their inner ears had tried and failed to make sense of the disappearance of gravity. That’s not entirely accurate - the ring is still spinning, their tethers dragging them onwards through the void, but out here Raven _feels_ weightless. She releases the magnetic lock on her boots and tugs on her short tether to turn her floating body out towards the stars. Clarke’s breathing is starting to even out. 

“How’s it feel?” Raven asks. 

“Terrifying,” Clarke says. “And… kind of magic.”

Raven glances at her. Her smile is a little unhinged, but she looks all right. Not a bad start to spacewalking at all. The light inside her helmet gleams off her golden hair, making her brighter than the distant stars.

She came out to repair a telemetry antenna that got a little dinged up by orbital debris, but for the moment that feels like it can wait. For a moment, Raven lets herself float on her back, watching Clarke’s face as she takes in the stars. For a moment, their grief belongs to another life.

  
DAY 159

“So the pawns are just stuck there?”

“Until one of them moves and leaves a way forward, yeah,” Clarke says, bracing her chin in her hands. There’s a sparkle to her eyes that suggests she finds Raven’s disgruntlement funny, which just fuels more disgruntlement. 

“Why don’t they just stab each other?” Raven demands. 

“Pawns can only attack diagonally,” Clarke repeats, pointing at the two squares on either side of the one Raven would rather target. Their “chessboard” is not a board but a grid drawn on the kitchen table, and in the absence of a set of real pieces they’re using tiny squares Clarke cut up with sketches of the pieces she used to play with. Raven sat down to humour her because it looked like she’d put a lot of work into drawing them, but she’s not particularly enjoying how slowly it moves, nor how easily Clarke’s horses are eating up her pawns. 

Raven chews on her thumbnail as she considers her next moves. The pawn that had been making a run for the opposite side of the board is stuck, her bishops are stuck, the queen seems too valuable to throw into the fray, and she’s already lost a tower to a gamble. 

But the alternative would be Clarke letting her win, and that would be worse. 

“I just think that’s stupid,” Raven mutters. “They should give the pawns more credit.” They’re the ones who die first. It doesn’t seem fair that their options are so limited. That they could get so far across the board and be stuck in deadlock with an enemy pawn, neither of them able to move forward. 

“Stop focusing on the pawn,” Clarke says with a smile. “I promise there’s a really good move open to you, you just haven’t noticed it yet.”

Raven reconsiders her bishops and the remaining tower. 

“We don’t have to finish the game if you’re not having fun,” Clarke says, and she sounds like she actually means it, which is infuriating. 

“No, I want to learn,” Raven says, and haphazardly pushes her last tower forward to eat one of Clarke’s pawns. 

“The paper kind of sucks,” Clarke says as they stack the pawn to the side. “It’s more fun when you can physically knock the other person’s pieces off the board. Me and Wells used to pretend to do actual battle with our knights when we were really little. We’d make them joust with their pencils.”

The mental image that brings up is oddly sweet, even as the hungry, bitter part of Raven that will never entirely go away mutters about the sort of happy childhood memories you can only get as an Alpha Station kid. 

“Who would win?” Raven aks.

“Me,” Clarke says, her smile far away. “Because I wasn’t afraid to stab Wells’ fingers.”

  
DAY 287

The hasty repairs Raven made to the liquid coolers in their first few weeks on the ring finally fail, and without the heat exchangers running to dissipate waste heat built up from solar radiation and the ring’s own electronics, it gets hot and muggy, fast. Emori promises she can fix it so earnestly that Raven is uncomfortable disagreeing, and she’s proved a quick study so far, so Raven agrees to give her a few hours to do her best.

That’s how she ends up lying in bed with Clarke, both of them stripped down to their bras and underwear and sweating into the sheets. Clarke is doodling something on the wall that looks like the crumpled ring in Arkadia, except that there are vines growing over it and dragging it into a hole in the ground that has opened up beneath it. The hole has teeth, and Raven can’t look at it for too long. Clarke’s expression is serene as she adds in some birds perched on the ring’s peak with fruit in their mouths and talons. 

Raven would give anything to taste fruit again. Anything that isn’t algae. 

“She wasn’t a bad mom,” Clarke murmurs. “At least until the whole murdering-your-dad-to-keep-the-public-from-rioting thing. I think she just wasn’t very good at coming home and turning off Councilwoman Abby.”

“Yeah, you guys aren’t similar at all,” Raven says. It goes right over Clarke’s head, and Raven smirks faintly. 

“I don’t know,” Clarke says with a shrug. “It’s just weird, missing her and hating her at the same time.”

Raven turns away and stares at the ceiling. The heat is lulling her into a sleepy, vulnerable trance. There’s not a lot to do on the ruins of the Ark, so they do this a lot - talk about feelings, she means. Raven thinks they’re like vultures picking at the carcasses of their previous lives for sustenance.

“At least she loved you,” Raven says. “Even when that love hurt. I think mine was completely apathetic.”

Clarke puts her pencil down and holds Raven’s hand. 

“You deserved better than that,” she says. “You deserved to be picked first.”

Bellamy once told them that history repeats itself, but he meant it in the sense of empires rising and falling, war generals making the same mistakes generations apart. Raven doesn’t think he meant it like this, but here they are, echoing their own lives over and over in the absence of new experiences. They’re not even a year in. Raven thinks the waiting might drive her insane. 

“Do you think the bunker is doing okay?” she asks instead of responding.

“I hope so,” Clarke says, scooting down the mattress and lying down on her half. Her cheekbones gleam with sweat. Raven’s giving it another twenty minutes and then she’s going to march down and check out the heat exchangers herself. “But I’m glad we’re not in it. Being underground would feel too much like a grave, I think.”

And they’ve had enough of those. Raven hums noncommittally. Clarke keeps going, her voice dreamlike.

“Up here we have windows, and stars, and…” Clarke lets her head fall to the side and smiles at her, slow and drowsy. “And you.”

Raven suddenly feels sick to her stomach with guilt.

“I’m gonna go see how Emori’s doing,” Raven says, rolling out of bed and picking up her shirt before deciding she really doesn’t want to put it back on while she’s so sweaty. Clarke waves her off and picks up her pencil again.

DAY 365

One year. No one wants to talk about it, but the silence throughout the ring tells Raven everyone’s been counting the days. Clarke doesn’t get out of bed, not that day, and not the next, either. 

DAY 437

“I think it might be my birthday,” Harper says, and by wordless agreement all seven of them start preparing for a party. Echo and Clarke get all the spare clothes and tie them to the ceiling struts to make a mockery of party banners that is so shitty it loops back into being kind of sweet. Monty and Murphy retreat into the greenhouse and come back out with a cask of experimental algae moonshine that might put someone in a coma again. Emori digs up a beautiful charm bracelet she found abandoned in a bathroom in their first week and decides it’ll be Harper’s gift, leaving Raven to wander into the control room in search of something to contribute to the festive atmosphere. 

The problem is that as much as she loves Harper, and as much as she wants to break the monotony of their routine with something like a party, she doesn’t want to celebrate _birthdays_. 

Finn used to save up for months to get enough credits to buy her citrus squares for her birthday, and when she thinks about it really hard she can almost remember the sweet-sour taste on her tongue, the crumbling soy wheat base. She can’t think about birthdays without remembering that, or remembering how many friends they left behind to die who will be young forever. She doesn’t want any reminder that they’re growing older through no virtue of their own. 

But it meant something to Harper to speak up about it. So Raven digs through Geo-Sci’s computers and filters for audio files. _Bingo_. Geo-Sci workers weren’t supposed to keep personal partitions on the system, but some did, because humans love breaking rules nearly as much as they love making them. Raven downloads the _‘lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to’_ playlist and returns back to the kitchen. 

It’s actually a nice party. Raven feels something subtle shifting, stitching them together as a group where before they mourned alone. She’s laughing at a story Echo’s telling about a mission gone comically wrong when Harper shouts. 

“Come here!” she says, gesturing them all towards the window. Raven trails behind the others reluctantly. She tries to avoid looking at Earth nowadays. Seeing all that fire and smoke clouding their continents and blue oceans makes her nauseated. Her stomach drops when she finally comes close enough to see what’s grabbed Harper’s attention. 

For the first time, the clouds of ash have cleared, and there in western North America, there is a little patch of green. Next to Raven, Clarke begins to sob, and Raven draws her close with an arm around her waist, her head leaned against Clarke’s temple. She doesn’t let herself cry too, but she really wants to.

  
DAY 584

“Pass!” Clarke hollers. “Pass! For fuck’s sake, Echo’s open!”

Raven hears the thud of their makeshift, not-quite-spherical soccer ball against metal and looks up just in time to see Monty bend over in shame as it slowly rolls out between his goalposts. Echo, who has taken to pre-apocalypse soccer with an alarming ferocity, bumps her fist against Harper’s as they trade places on the pitch. They shouldn’t be on the same team.

Murphy retrieves the ball with a disgruntled glare, and Raven laughs to herself and goes back to trying to model a survivable water landing with the fumes they still have left in their fuel tanks. Fumes they wouldn’t even have if Bellamy’s weight had been added to the rocket when they launched. If his death ends up saving them _again_ , Raven is going to pull out her hair.

She hasn’t found a model that won’t kill them all on impact yet, but she’s still trying. Murphy manages a goal. Raven pays attention long enough to join in the shit-talking and then adjusts her calculations for a slower orbital decay and runs it again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

  
DAY 812

“Apples,” Raven says. 

“ _Apples?”_ Clarke repeats with a disbelieving laugh. “No, too sour. I’d pick, um, those raspberries that grew by Arkadia.”

“Those were still kind of sour,” Raven muses, propping her arms behind her head and stretching. Clarke’s eyes flicker down for just a second. 

“That’s ‘cause Miller and I ate all the sweet ripe ones and then you hooligans swooped in and started eating the green ones,” she teases. “Okay, fine, ummm, this was a few days before you landed, but the first meat we ever tasted was a panther that tried to kill Wells. Oh my god, Raven. We didn’t even cook it well, it was so tough to chew, we didn’t have any seasoning yet, and Bellamy was being an _ass_ about the wristbands - “

Raven’s stomach drops out from underneath her as Clarke says his name, but Clarke keeps going, her hands gesturing as she tells the story, her smile wistful but sure and strong and - After Finn died, Raven would sometimes forget about it for a few seconds, and then she’d remember and it would hurt all over again, but Clarke isn’t retreating in on herself like she used to, and - 

“Ugh, are you zoning out to think about orbital mechanics again?” Clarke groans, dramatically throwing herself across Raven’s lap. The smile it brings out of Raven is genuine. She pokes at the pain and is shocked to find it dull and faint, like a bruise nearly healed, the skin marked by the faintest nebula of broken capillaries.

“Can’t help it,” Raven jokes back, pushing a lock of hair out of Clarke’s eyes as she sits up again. “Orbital mechanics are just so sexy. That sweet, sweet gravitational constant is calling my name.”

Clarke hums in response, but now she’s the one who seems distracted. The way she’s leaning over Raven’s lap, her hand splayed next to Raven’s thigh, it puts her so close to Raven it’s making her a little nervous. Clarke tilts her head and her hair slipping over her shoulder sends the smell of Ark soap wafting over to Raven’s nose, but it smells so much better on her, and Raven’s sure she’s noticed the mole above Clarke’s lip before, but she feels like she’s seeing it for the first time, and - 

She forgets how to form thoughts in her head as Clarke leans in and kisses her. The last person Raven kissed was Wick, who is probably dead like everyone else, and he was hungry, demanding, they were both so frantic and frustrated, and Clarke doesn’t kiss like that, like she’s taking something. Her lips are gentle and chapped and Raven is still frozen in the moment of contact, unable to move, when Clarke pulls back and looks at her. 

“Raven?” Clarke asks, her face suddenly unsure, that familiar wrinkle in her forehead returning in full force. The guilt punches Raven in the gut and threatens to drag her down. “I’m - I’m so sorry, I thought - “

“Bellamy,” Raven chokes out, unable to form anything more coherent than that. Clarke retreats back to her side of the bench and rubs self-consciously at her arm. 

“I miss him too,” she whispers. “But…”

“I’m not him,” Raven says. She’s always had a problem with jealousy. She thinks it was inevitable to crave everything when she started out with so little in life, but she doesn’t think it’s ever felt as bitter and acidic as this moment. 

“Do you want me to go?” Clarke asks, and Raven’s hand flies out and grabs hers before she can consciously think _no_. 

“Stay,” she whispers, and Clarke settles in next to her, a little awkward, and they both hold their breath. 

“You’re the only person I was thinking about when I kissed you,” Clarke says at last. Raven bites her lip and lets her head loll towards Clarke. She feels her breath spill over her cheek, warm and intimate, and part of Raven thinks that they’ve been on the precipice for a while. 

She takes the leap of faith.

“We could try again,” Raven whispers, and tilts her face upwards to see Clarke’s eyes blink in shock and hope. They kiss again and Raven’s faulty little heart beats furiously, _traitorously_ against her ribcage. She’s not sure who she feels like she’s betraying more. She only knows that now that they’ve started, she never wants to stop.

  
DAY 1248

“Let me see,” Harper begs, trying to peek over Raven’s clipboard. 

“Absolutely not,” Raven says, crushing it to her chest and ducking underneath her arm to take refuge behind Monty. 

“I _clearly_ have dibs on seeing it first,” Emori complains loudly, spreading her arms wide over the kitchen table. “Seeing as everyone else’s is done, and I’m the last one unaccounted for.”

“I wouldn’t be so excited if I were you,” Raven snickers, sitting with her back to the wall and adding the last few details of her sketch. She doesn’t remember who suggested this stupid contest of trying to draw each other, but it’s all going downhill. Murphy’s drawing of Monty is only recognizable because the stick figure is holding a potted plant, while Clarke’s sketch of Raven is so detailed it’s like looking into a mirror. Echo fared a little better with Harper and drew pretty good braids, and Monty didn’t do too badly either. 

Raven falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. She finishes shading in Emori’s tattoo and strides with the clipboard to the wall where Monty is taping all the portraits up. The muffled shriek Emori makes when Raven and Monty step aside makes them all laugh. 

“Not bad,” Clarke says, slipping an arm around Raven’s waist and planting a wet kiss on her cheek. “Maybe we’ll make an artist out of you.” She and Clarke took it slow, at first, afraid to break the fragile thing between them, and small touches like this in public still thrill Raven.

“I think Murphy needs lessons more than I do,” Raven laughs, nosing against Clarke’s warm hair, and for a moment the laughter is enough to drive away the calculations and endless failed simulations that haunt her. She lets herself linger in the kitchen’s bright lights and playful banter. This is why she’s working so hard. This is why it’s worth it.

DAY 1726

Raven wakes up in the middle of the night needing to pee. Clarke murmurs in disappointment as Raven slips out of bed. Her fingers search the empty space Raven just left and by the night-cycle light in the hallway Raven can see her frown, but Clarke doesn’t wake, not even when her fingertips start a spark of static electricity from those fuzzy pants she loves so much. 

The longer Raven lingers the further sleep slips out of reach. She misses the passage of actual days and nights on the ground. It seems weird to go back to deciding when the day ends by democracy, and she thinks her insomnia might be her very cells revolting. Still - being awake at this strange, dreamlike hour feels exciting and forbidden in the way very few things still do. Clarke looks ethereal by this light, her skin pale blue, her hair white like a pure flame. Raven sits on the edge of the bed and watches her breathing for a few minutes.

Nearly five years ago they shared a bed and Raven couldn’t match the speed of their breathing together. She tries now and finds it not only possible but soothing. Raven used to know love only as something possessive and hungry. There’s no hurry when she looks at Clarke, just a quiet, fond warmth. She could keep looking forever, but the pressure on her bladder is only getting harder to ignore.

“Love you,” Raven whispers, and leans in to kiss Clarke’s temple. She jerks back when Clarke’s skin shocks her bottom lip with another spark of static electricity. “Ow, rude - “

Raven’s eyes widen as two thoughts collide. Pee. Sparks. She goes to the bathroom on auto-pilot, already crunching the numbers in her head, but they’re too big to keep track of and her excitement keeps butting in. She goes back to her workroom and pushes aside the stack of discarded plans she made using their leftover fuel and conservative flight paths. All she needs is an oxidizer and a fuel that will burn in contact with it, and this is dangerous, but - human urine is 95% water, and if she builds a large enough electrolysis machine and diverts current from the rest of the ring she can split the H2O molecules. She sets oxyhydrogen aside as a backup plan for now, since it’s the more volatile choice and she’d rather they don’t blow up on her way down, but oxygen and hydrogen…

Oh.

It’s not going to be enough.

She swallows hard and pushes away her incomplete calculations. They don’t have the kind of equipment necessary to cool the hydrogen to negative 33 degrees Kelvin to turn it into liquid fuel, and even if they did - 

There’s just not enough water up here with them, not even if she convinced everyone to take her gamble and used everything in Monty’s algae farm and they all dehydrated themselves to the point of danger…

No. It’s not enough.

She’s not enough. 

Raven thought this was different. A breakthrough. Something new she hadn’t thought of, a genius idea she could surprise the others with in the morning. She sweeps all her work off the table and bangs her fists against the surface. Something like adrenaline bubbles underneath her skin, demanding to be let out. She screams herself hoarse and whips her tools at the far wall and kicks the crate full of spare parts over and none of it helps close the widening chasm in her chest. Raven thought she knew despair and helplessness. She’s already given everything. 

She gave the universe her leg and Finn and her memories and Sinclair and her brain and Bellamy and still it comes back with hungry jaws, wanting more, wanting to leave her with even less.

There’s nothing left to give, she’s not enough, she’s failed them all. They’ll never return to the Earth and taste apples and meat and unripe raspberries again -

“Raven!” Murphy yells, grabbing at her arms and pinning her to his chest before she can slam her fists down on her table again. “Raven, calm down, what’s going on?” 

She lets herself go limp in his arms and they both sag to the floor, panting and shaking. 

“What is it?” Murphy asks, wild-eyed, afraid. Afraid of her. 

“I can’t get us to the ground,” Raven says dully. 

“You’re the smartest person in the universe,” Murphy says. “You just haven’t - “

“I can’t do it, Murphy,” she says, harsher, watching him flinch away. 

He shakes his head, slowly at first, and then with more desperation. The only time she’s seen him look so betrayed before was when Clarke was ready to inject Emori with the experimental nightblood. This might be worse. He leaves Raven there in the wreckage of her workshop, his footsteps hurried and fading and then there is only the silence of her failure ringing in her ears.

DAY 1806

It takes her a long time to confess. The shame burns in the back of her throat. Every word that comes out scrapes against it.

“If we spend the rest of our lives up here, it’ll be okay,” Clarke says earnestly, grabbing Raven’s hands and clutching them tightly even as Raven shakes her head. This understanding, the gentleness of Clarke’s tone - it’s worse than it would have been if she yelled and screamed and told her to get her shit together. “No, Raven - listen to me, it’s not your fault. It’s okay. There’s worse ways to die than of old age, peacefully, surrounded by friends.”

Of all of them, Raven loves the ring the most, except maybe Emori, who has taken to it more than any of them would have guessed. Raven loves every panel and rivet and malfunctioning circuit of this stupid station, and even she knows this is a hollow life. Clarke is a good liar, and this time Raven can’t even fault her for trying. She’s only doing it to take some of the burden off of Raven. It’s as kind of a lie as it is cruel. 

“No,” Raven says softly, raising Clarke’s knuckles to her mouth and kissing them. “We’re not going to die here.”

They’ve got ghosts to bury on the ground.

  
DAY 2005

Something’s coming. Raven hasn’t told the others yet, but deep space telemetry picked up an approaching object just past Pluto a few months ago. Analysis of its chemical trail didn’t match anything in the database, so Raven logged as a bug and forgot about it. But it’s just passed the belt of asteroids that lies between Jupiter and Mars, and it changed course to avoid a collision. 

Asteroids don’t change course.

So someone is coming, and if they keep their current trajectory they’ll intersect with Earth in less than two hundred days, and Raven’s mind skitters sideways into fear if she starts thinking too hard about who it could be. Probably a good thing they’ve got Clarke on their side. Whoever’s coming, they might not be friendly. And Clarke, well. Clarke would burn the whole planet a third time if it could save them.

“What are you working on?”

Speak of the devil. Raven whirls around to find Clarke leaning in the control room’s doorway, her face open and curious and still a little sleepy. In the moth-eaten flannel pants she wears for pajamas, with pink pillow-creases on her cheek, she looks more innocent than she is. The ring is purgatory, of sorts. It’s peaceful, but it’s not really real. And Raven's gut instinct tells her that everything is going to change in two hundred days. They can prepare, or… She can let the others enjoy the last two hundred days of their respite from the bloody lives they lived before.

Raven forces a smile and says, “Nothing.” 

Clarke accepts the lie without a hint of suspicion, and Raven feels only a little guilty as she shuts down her workstation and follows her lover back to bed.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from Stars' Dead Hearts, which is a huge delinquent mood and has definitely made me cry. You know what else made me cry? Trying to make the scenes where Raven gets all science-genius-y sound vaguely plausible. Chemistry was my WORST class in high school and that scene where she thinks about making fuel out of pee came from a half-remembered throwaway line from The Martian and I'm not smart enough to figure out how fake it is. Thank u nasa for writing so many foolproof articles, you da real mvp. If the FBI is watching me I hope they're not too concerned about me frantically googling rocket fuel recipes.
> 
> Thanks to Sara and Bailey for holding so many amazing rounds of [Chopped](https://chopped100challenge.tumblr.com/) and pumping creativity and positivity into the fandom, you guys are great!! If you liked this fic, you should definitely check out the others in the collection, maybe vote for your favs when that opens up on Feb 12 (I think?)
> 
> P.S Bellamy is FINE in this au, he also got nightblood and found Madi and raised her into an even nerdier version than the one that grew up with Clarke and they're okay!!! But Clarke and Raven don't know about it.


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